Subtle changes to culture required to attract diverse talent

New research from Wharton identifies the different criteria that women MBA graduates use to determine the jobs they’ll apply for and which ones they won’t. It provides some interesting new information on the familiar challenge of attracting women into male-dominated jobs.

The research calls for a stronger focus on how people apply for jobs and in particular, understanding what jobs women identify with and why, and understanding how they weigh up their chances of success.

According to Barbulescu, one of the researchers, “It’s a question of trying to change the culture, job perceptions and kinds of behavior that people exhibit. My sense is that everybody talks about this, but I’m not sure how serious managers are about the tradeoffs they would have to make in order to attract and retain more women — such as reorganizing basic work processes to allow for more reasonable work hours, or changing the norms about acceptable behavior. That’s a much harder conversation to have.”